Two Decades Late, Drudge Discovers That Americans Like Salsa

Two Decades Late, Drudge Discovers That Americans Like Salsa

As I write, the Drudge Report’s top spot is occupied by the tasteful image above. Salsa has evidently overtaken ketchup because … Mexicans! (It’s a well-known fact that non-Mexicans never consume salsa.)

Racial panic issues aside, Matt Drudge is about two decades late on this. The headline links to a fairly innocuous AP story about how America’s changing demographics are influencing eating habits, which begins with the lede “Salsa overtaking ketchup as America's No. 1 condiment was just the start.”

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It was indeed “just the start” in 1992 when it was first reported. "The taste for salsa is as mainstream as apple pie these days," David A. Weiss, the president of Packaged Facts Inc., told the New York Times in that fateful year when we learned that America's favorite condiment was being outsold by a picante imposter from south of the border.

As readers are well aware, life in America has just not been the same since the king of condiments was dethroned. It's now nearly impossible to find ketchup, in any of its 57 varieties, in U.S. stores. By the end of Obama’s second term, it will surely be banned entirely. I can only anticipate the horrors that will await us in the great Sriracha infestation of 2018.

Joshua Keating is a staff writer at Slate focusing on international affairs.